Through the Cracks: Lovely Music Ltd.

Lovely Music Ltd.

Three-hour recordings of rivers and operas that sound like overheard conversation aren't for everyone. I understand that. But when I call Lovely Music Ltd.'s founder Mimi Johnson to report their sales figures-- I want to know exactly how many people to imagine huddled under the great bridge of the universe, communing with what I firmly believe is music that could, if used properly, bolster the stock of humanity as a whole-- she demurs. "Some albums sell 500 copies in a year; some sell 12-- numbers that mean nothing compared to a bigger label's, but are important to us. I won't get into specifics, really, but I'll tell you that we never run out of anything."

Tiny labels selflessly nourishing a pouch of devotees isn't news-- this is how the indie ideology logically plays out. But Lovely is an anomaly even in indie mythos: Ten to 15 years in a scene shows diligence; 30 shows religious single-mindedness. Several albums in Lovely's catalog aren't just good, they're considered prime examples of their genre; they're blurbs in textbooks.

Admittedly, Lovely's obscurity says less about the quality of its releases and more about the total irrelevance of modern composition to most peoples' musical lives. Okay: Some art is destined for obscurity-it's weird and unfair; it's true. But, to invoke an assertion Jayson Greene made in his Pitchfork review of the most recent John Adams opera-- that he's "the world's only uncool minimalist"-- I can't help but wonder why Steve Reich and Philip Glass were adopted into the cultural vernacular while most listeners haven't heard Robert Ashley, let alone Eliane Radigue or Annea Lockwood (or David Behrman's Leapday Night or "Blue" Gene Tyranny's Country Boy Country Dog/How to Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life or Meredith Monk's Key).

So it's with some idea of duty that I write about Lovely's releases from the past year-- too understated to grip avant-garde fetishists, too peacefully bizarre to be embraced by most classically oriented audiences. But it's also with trepidation, the vanity of feeling like I'm whispering a secret, and, most importantly, respect for the sounds as I hear them.

Robert Ashley: Now Eleanor's Idea and Concrete Ashley's operas upend the genre as you probably know it. Over the past 40 years, he's staged nearly the same scene, ad infinitum: Four (or so) people speaking with rhythmic and melodic character-- but not singing, really-- over a subdued backdrop of synthesizer drones. Though his libretto follows narrative-- in Now Eleanor's Idea, a bank teller's personal epiphany inspires her report low-rider culture as a television journalist; in Concrete, an elderly man files through secrets his friends have confided in him-- Ashley's characters flutter toward their subjects sideways, with verbose observations, anecdotes, inferences. When they're on a roll, they sound haunted, not agitated; most of the time, they revel in meditation.

The product mirrors unfocused thought-- a void spiked with aimless eurekas about how skylines are straight even though the world is round, or stories of how airbrush jobs touch our lives. But Ashley's post-beatnik gravity-- he's 78, articulate, and has been pictured in the press wearing shark-tooth necklaces more often than he has smiling-- doesn't crush his aphoristic sense of humor, which is where he hides his brightest insights. The narrator of Concrete, sitting in his chair, adrift: "My friend moves to New York and begins writing a puzzling but amazing book about... life. I won't speak about the book-- it's too personal."

Eliane Radigue: Jetsun MilaFor almost 30 years, the French Buddhist Eliane Radigue composed and recorded exclusively with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, a forbidding enormity that appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a device for communicating with aliens, sold about 100 units, and was, I'd guess, numbered for its weight in pounds.

The 84-minute Jetsun Mila, originally recorded in 1986, is one of three Radigue albums named after Milarepa, an 11th-century Tibetan poet and yogi. Each section supposedly correlates to an episode in Milarepa's life, a pretense I ignore without feeling too guilty, not least because ignoring pretense lets me listen to the music, which is stunning.

Radigue's compositions and performances don't need liner notes to convey narrative; it's implicit in the way her music unfolds, from kernels of silence to fog banks that expand and contract like a breathing body-- which is to say that it's unhurried music that achieves motion without throwing a fit or setting fires, marked by changes almost impossible to notice. Though I'm skeptical of most drone records (most of the music sounds impotent and its defenders plain vague to the point of stupid), I don't have a problem saying that Jetsun Mila strikes me as an ideal piece of its kind-- put as conceptually as possible, music that implies stasis without succumbing to it. About 40 minutes through each listen, I skip back to a point near the beginning. Each time, I barely recognize it.

"Blue" Gene Tyranny: The Somewhere Songs/The Invention of MemoryThough Dominique Leone spotlighted a reissue of his "pop" album, Out of the Blue, on the site last year, my favorite Tyranny recordings-- the bright, formless splashes of piano and electronics on Country Boy Country Dog and Take Your Time-- focus less on his ambitions as a composer and more on his abilities as a musician and improviser. This one, though, is structured, and the only record of his I've heard besides Out of the Blue that features vocals (by Thomas Buckner, a near-fixture in Robert Ashley's operas).

While I prefer Tyranny's crystalline rambling as a focal point (he once told me he fell in love with Liberace as a child; I'm not surprised), I can certainly abide by some of his folksy art songs. Any queer beatitude lost by toning down the 64th notes is more than made up for in his syntax as a songwriter: Most lyricists want to know where they'd parked the car; Tyranny wonders, like an old alien coot, where he parked the automobile.

(NB: Mutable handled this record, but the bulk of his releases have been through Lovely.)

Annea Lockwood: A Sound Map of the Danube A Sound Map of the Danube is at once the simplest, most far-out, most ambitious, and most tedious piece of music here: 167 minutes of field recordings documenting the Danube and stories of people living along it. It's not a record I listen to often-again, one river, three hours-- but I admit to putting it on every once in a while as a kind of thought exercise. Granted, the exercise is primarily focused on how I'd like to spend more time at actual rivers, but it's also about the variables of naturally occurring sound environments. And when I'm feeling really sensitive, about deep concepts of musical sound versus ambience, of registering all auditory information as narrative, as aesthetic. Records on Lovely-- even ones as conceptually hyperbolic as Lockwood's-- tend to provoke this phenomenon in people with patience, I think: listening.